Freeh on technology

Technology is one of four key ingredients — and possibly the most critical — in ensuring U.S. success in the so-called war on terror, former FBI Director Louis Freeh said in a lunchtime speech in San Francisco today.

Freeh used the occasion, speaking at the CardTechSecurTech conference at Moscone West, to warn that “the application and innovation of technology has to be balanced against the need and requirement in our country that people have liberties. That balance is critical and complex.”

“After 9/11, that balance moved, and rightly so, very far in the direction of security,” he said. “We had to make sure that did not happen again. But the 9/11 window is closing.”

Other key ingredients in winning the war on terror, Freeh said, are politics, the military, and economics. We can’t always achieve the political will for action, he said, and Iraq shows both that military might is limited and that American style free markets can’t always deliver democracy. But technology is the one area “where we can see tangible results and risk reduction,” he said.

Yet he continually emphasized the need for balance.

Freeh questioned whether the Patriot Act went too far, and whether Congress gave President Bush too much power. He even took some sly digs; at one point, discussing his early career as an undercover agent working on Mafia cases, he described a mob boss who was the subject of court-approved wiretapping. “In those days, you needed warrants to do it,” he said.

Now that Freeh serves on the board of a biometric security company, L-1 Identity Solutions, he said security and privacy must remain paramount concerns.

In a way, he said, the technology is bringing us full circle. “Primordial humans identified themselves by smell, by their ears and eyes,” he said. Biometrics represents a return to using what makes us human as a means of identification.